CONNOISSEURWho better to ask for restaurant recommendations that a critic?, writes Hugo Arnold
THE QUESTION IS a frequently asked one. We are off to London, where do we go to eat? Having been a resident there for nearly 25 years, and a frequent visitor since then, it is expected that I should know. In Dublin we certainly have a wide and varied choice, but in London, it is huge. And if I say Great Queen Street in Covent Garden is one of my favourite places to eat, that is all very well, but its noisy, uncompromising take on English food may not be ideal for Granny, or the aunt you might be staying with.
That said, if you want to eat Chinese, Thai, Indian, Italian, French, or vegetarian, London is undoubtedly one of the world's most fruitful hunting grounds. Yet keeping abreast of what is so often called "The London Dining Scene" is not easy. Its fast pace, changing tastes and competitive spirit mean you need to be on the inside track if you want to enjoy a busy room, good food and feel you have not chosen some forgotten backwater that may well have hit the headlines in a Sunday newspaper some months ago, but which is now very much not where the action is.
Charles Campion makes backwaters his business. But then the high- and side-streets are his business, too. My last lunch with him was several years ago at Le Gavroche, where the set lunch, costing £48, including half a bottle of wine and mineral water, is surely one of the city's best gastronomic bargains. That night, he was off to Southall in search of a kebab house somebody had told him about.
Campion has been writing The London Restaurant Guide for some years now. Helpfully laid out by area, it contains more than 400 establishments and all of them are worth considering, including the 79 restaurants added this year.
A former ad man, Charles writes for the London Evening Standard, the Independent, and whole host of magazines, and appears on TV shows. To say he eats London is a bit of an understatement. I have known him to lunch twice in a day, and he is not averse to revisiting establishments that he thinks need a further look.
His passion and commitment, helpful and insightful prose, customer-focused view point and knowledge (he once owned a restaurant, and often seems to have the classical canon at his finger tips), mean he writes as he talks, is not interested in frippery and pays as much attention to fashion as he judges necessary to be in touch.
The hardest thing about picking restaurants for any city visit is considering the less obvious as well as the obvious occasions; lunch and dinner for sure, but also the afternoon snack while shopping, the last lunch before heading for the airport, a mid-morning snack having left your hotel earlier than was entirely necessary.
If you take an area such as Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia (quaint-sounding, taking in Tottenham Court Road and the east end of Oxford Street) you are pointed to Fino (fantastic Spanish food), Eagle Bar Diner (casual and accessible), Hakkasan (top-end Chinese), Ikkyu (hard to find but well-executed Japanese food in basement premises), The Kerala (fantastic Indian at unbelievable prices), and Passione, (run by a mentor of Jamie Oliver's and good for simple Italian food). This is also the area for top-end Pied-a-Terre and Roka, The Salt Yard, Sardinian-influenced Sardo and the original Wagamama.
How comprehensive is all that?
The London Restaurant Guide, by Charles Campion, is published by Profile Books, £8.99